1: It’s the late ’90s. John Ortberg “was working at Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago, one of the most influential churches in the world,” John Mark Comer writes in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.
“John himself is a well-known teacher and best-selling author—the kind of guy you figure pretty much has apprenticeship to Jesus down,” John Mark notes, “But behind the scenes he felt like he was getting sucked into the vortex of megachurch insanity.”
John decided to call his mentor, Dallas Willard, the American philosopher and noted Christian author, to ask for some advice.
“What do I need to do to become the me I want to be?” John asked.
There was a long moment of silence. “There’s always a long silence on the other end of the line.” John says of Dallas.
Then: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
John writes down that line in his notebook.
Then he asks, “Okay, what else?”
More silence.
Dallas says, “There is nothing else. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
Bang.
“When I first heard that,” John Mark writes, “I felt a deep resonance with reality. Hurry is the root problem underneath so many of the symptoms of toxicity in our world. And yet Dallas’s reply is not what I would expect. . . I bet very few of us would default to ‘hurry’ as our answer.
“But read the Bible: Satan doesn’t show up as a demon with a pitchfork and gravelly smoker voice or as Will Ferrell with an electric guitar and fire on Saturday Night Live,” he writes. Today, you’re far more likely to run into the enemy in the form of an alert on your phone while you’re reading your Bible or a multiday Netflix binge or a full-on dopamine addiction to Instagram or a Saturday morning at the office or another soccer game on a Sunday or commitment after commitment after commitment in a life of speed.”
Nor is Dallas’ insight new. The psychologist Carl Jung observed, “Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.”
Corrie ten Boom, who during the Holocaust saved more than 800 Jews, once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy.
“There’s truth in that,” John Mark observes. “Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off our connection to God, to other people, and even to our own souls.”
What are we likely to hear when we ask someone how they are doing?
“Oh, good—just busy,” people say.
“Pay attention and we’ll find this answer everywhere—across ethnicity, gender, stage of life, even class,” John Mark notes. “College students are busy. Young parents are busy. Empty nesters living on a golf course are busy. CEOs are busy; so are baristas and part-time nannies. Americans are busy, Kiwis are busy, Germans are busy—we’re all busy.”
One day, John Mark was talking with his therapist about his vision to re-architect his church around apprenticeship to Jesus.
“He loved it,” he says of his “Jesus-loving, ubersmart PhD . . . , but he kept saying the same thing: ‘The number one problem you will face is time. People are just too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually rich and vibrant lives.”
When Professor Michael Zigarelli conducted a study of over twenty thousand Christians worldwide, he identified busyness as a major distraction from spiritual life.
John Mark suggests we look closely to Michael’s findings: “It may be the case that (1) Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to (2) God becoming more marginalized in Christians’ lives, which leads to (3) a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to (4) Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to (5) more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload. And then the cycle begins again.
“And pastors, by the way, are the worst,” John Mark comments. “He rated busyness in my profession right up there with lawyers and doctors.”
Moreover, in our culture, slow is seen as a negative. “When somebody has a low IQ, we dub him or her slow,” he writes. “When the service at a restaurant is lousy, we call it slow. When a movie is boring, again, we complain that it’s slow.”
Here’s how the Merriam-Webster dictionary describes slow: “Mentally dull: stupid: naturally inert or sluggish: lacking in readiness, promptness, or willingness.”
The clear message? Slow is bad; fast is good.
2: So what is the highest value that Jesus talks about?
It’s an easy answer: Love. “Jesus made that crystal clear. He said the greatest command in all of the Torah was to ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul…and with all your strength,’ followed only by, ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’
“But love is painfully time-consuming. All parents know this, as do all lovers and most long-term friends.
“Hurry and love are incompatible,” John Mark explains. “All my worst moments as a father, a husband, and a pastor, even as a human being, are when I’m in a hurry—late for an appointment, behind on my unrealistic to-do list, trying to cram too much into my day. I ooze anger, tension, a critical nagging—the antitheses of love.”
Think back on the last time we tried to get our family, a colleague, or a friend out the door when we’re running late. “Just pay attention to how we relate to them. Does it look and feel like love? Or is it far more in the vein of agitation, anger, a biting comment, a rough glare? Hurry and love are oil and water: they simply do not mix.”
When the apostle Paul defines love, he begins by describing love as “patient.”
“There’s a reason people talk about walking’ with God, not ‘running’ with God,” John Mark points out.
What about joy and peace, the other two core realities of Jesus’s teaching?
“Love, joy, and peace are the triumvirate at the heart of Jesus’s kingdom vision,” John Mark writes. “All three are more than just emotions; they are overall conditions of the heart. They aren’t just pleasant feelings; they are the kinds of people we become through our apprenticeship to Jesus, who embodies all three ad infinitum.
“And all three are incompatible with hurry.”
What do we know about joy? “All the spiritual masters from inside and outside the Jesus tradition agree on this one (as do secular psychologists, mindfulness experts, etc.),” he observes. If there’s a secret to happiness, it’s simple—presence to the moment. The more present we are to the now, the more joy we tap into.
“And peace? Need I even make a case? Think of when we’re in a hurry for our next event, running behind: Do we feel the deep shalom of God in our soul? A grounded, present sense of calm and well-being?”
Hardly.
“To restate: love, joy, and peace are at the heart of all Jesus is trying to grow in the soil of our lives,” he notes. “And all three are incompatible with hurry.”
3: Twenty years later after his conversation with Dallas Willard, John Ortberg is now a mentor to John Mark. At lunch, John says, “I cannot live in the kingdom of God with a hurried soul.”
None of us can. “Not only does hurry keep us from the love, joy, and peace of the kingdom of God—the very core of what all human beings crave,” John Mark comments, “but it also keeps us from God himself simply by stealing our attention.”
There is a better way. As Walter Adams, the spiritual director to C. S. Lewis, once said: “To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace. Hurry is the death of prayer and only impedes and spoils our work. It never advances it.”
And finally, from Ronald Rolheiser: “Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…. We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion.”
Distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. Wowza.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I letting busyness crowd out love, joy, and peace in my life—or am I willing to slow down so I can experience and share what matters most?
Action: Notice moments today when hurry threatens my ability to love well; intentionally slow my pace, become present, and choose patience over pressure.
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